Stimulated Near-Infrared Light Emission in Graphene

Graphene—a carbon sheet only one atom thick—provides physicists with a playground to explore exotic quantum phenomena, and engineers with a material with which they may be able to miniaturize electronic devices and catch up with Moore’s law [1, 2]. New results reported in Physical Review Letters by Tianqi Li and colleagues at Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University suggest that graphene has also earned its place in the arsenal of promising photonic materials [3]. Li et al. established two necessary conditions for possible lasing applications—a population inversion of charge carriers and optical gain—by exciting graphene with very short pulses of light.